Last of the summer wine

Weatherwise, it hasn’t been a great summer here, on the whole, and the signs are that it’s downhill from here.  After a very warm ten days or so in July, we had a mostly disappointing August – remarkably dull, grey and with a chilly wind from the north, for much of the month.  September has been better, with a couple of warm days but mostly just nice autumnal weather: plenty of misty mornings, pleasant days and cooler evenings once the sun has set.  Although the summer has been dry overall, it hasn’t been exactly the sort of weather that we might have hoped for, and now change is on the way, with wet and windy autumnal conditions for the next few weeks.

Lefty's morning bath

The depressing August weather was all the more depressing for coinciding with the end of the birds’ breeding season, when the juveniles start dispersing and the adults take themselves into hiding while they moult.  For a few weeks the entertainment of their comings and goings declines quite noticeably, as does their interest in the bird feeders, though they do enjoy the birdbaths; moulting must be a slightly uncomfortable business, and a nice bath seems to help.  The birds are still around, but often relatively inconspicuous (and mostly silent) in the tree canopies or out in the hedgerows, where there’s plenty of food for them, though a family of long-tailed tits did turn up on the fatball feeder one day.  They’re always a cheerful sight, clustering together with their tails sticking out in all directions, until they decide they need to be somewhere else.  A couple of warblers (chiffchaffs?) have been catching insects from the treetops, and a pair of tawny owls calling mournfully in the evenings.  The robins are marking out their winter territories with melancholy-sounding songs; sadly the thin robin who mostly hangs around the patio seems to have damaged its right foot, with the claws all clenched together as a sort of peg-leg, though it appears to be managing well enough.  Perhaps I ought to call it Righty the Robin, on the same lines as Lefty the lame pigeon.

Long-tailed tits on the fatballs

Lefty, with his lady, seems to have raised at least two youngsters; we watched them pester him (unsuccessfully) for food one day.  He wasn’t having any of it, even when one of them jumped on him like an overenthusiastic toddler, and they went off to find their own supper.  The pigeons at the bottom end of the garden, meanwhile, who are quite tolerant of our comings and goings, spent much of the late summer trying to nest in the plum tree.  It wasn’t much of a nest, just a few sticks high in the canopy, and the cold August winds destroyed it at least once, but finally they seem to have succeeded: a youngster has been calling to be fed from the nest over the past few days.

The August winds also gave a further battering to the poor old buddleja, which nevertheless managed to flower well enough to attract a good number of butterflies.  Red Admirals and small tortoiseshells were well represented, and there was a painted lady, but few peacocks this year; however I did finally manage a definite identification of a small skipper, which I thought I had seen several times in the past but which were flitting about too fast for me to see them properly (which is why they’re called skippers).  This one sat on the buddleja for long enough for me to get my phone and take a photo. We ought to have a healthy population of large whites in future, too; the netting over the brassicas failed to keep them off the broccoli, and their caterpillars have eaten the plants bare.

Small skipper on the buddleja

Red admiral

Painted lady

Large white butterfly caterpillars - no broccoli this year!

If the butterflies provide garden interest by day, and the owls by night, it's the hedgehog that we look for in the evenings; we've seen him or her a few times when we've been returning from supper in the summerhouse after dark.  Slugs do not seem to have been a problem this year, and this may be the reason why!